Artist Claims ‘Solo’ Character Posters Stole His Designs

The flashy character posters for Solo: A Star Wars Story that were revealed last month give the movie a very colorful, retro vibe and hearken back to an era where key art for movies was painted by hand and used exciting, original designs to sell their product. Except, last week, an artist claimed that the posters weren’t original at all — in fact, that they were lifted almost entirely from his own work.

French artist Hachim Bahous posted a photo on Facebook comparing the Solo posters to his own designs for the compilation album covers of Sony Music’s “Legacy” series, which celebrates everything from funk to soul and hit shelves back in 2015. The movie posters copy almost exactly the person-behind-block-text concept, even down to the shade of color they picked.

Left the official posters of the next Star Wars (Disney), right the compiles for which I made the creation in 2015 for Sony Music France / Legacy Recordings France following the brief of the project leader Romain 'Rpiz' Pizon.
I am flattered that the quality of my work is recognized, but it is still pure and simple forgery, I have not been asked for my permission, I wish to be credited and paid for this work I have done for Sony!

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It’s definitely not an homage, since an homage kind of requires that the original work be extremely well-known across all platforms, not just to, say, collectors of music compilation albums. Plus, there’s no connection between Solo and the history of jazz music, so subtly correlating these two things in this way wouldn’t make any sense. /Film notes that Sony could have sold the design concepts to Disney without notifying Bahous, since these are technically Sony’s property now, but still, to completely rip off something like this looks extremely shady, and Disney is a large company with tons of people with many different ideas. Disney hasn’t yet responded to the controversy.